Offseason Notes for November 3rd

Jose Reyes won’t take a hometown discount to sign with Santiago’s Águilas Cibaeñas.

Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Offseason Notes.

1. Assorted Headlines
2. SCOUT Leaderboards: Dominican Winter League
3. Prospecting: John Sickels on Detroit

Assorted Headlines
All the nerd that’s fit to print.

Reyes Will Not Take Hometown Discount
There is almost no chance that Jose Reyes will accept a hometown discount to remain with the Mets, Reyes’s friend’s girlfriend’s house cleaner’s postmaster told Mike Puma of the New York Post. “Reyes is also a reggaeton musician and owner of a record label,” according to his Wikipedia page.

AFL Unveils Rosters for Rising Stars Game
The Rising Stars game features the top players from the Arizona Fall League and will be broadcast live on MLB.com and MLB Network on Saturday, Nov. 5 at 5 p.m. Mountain Time. The number-one and -two overall picks from the 2011 draft, Gerrit Cole and Danny Hultzen, will be starting the game for the East and West Division teams, respectively. More importantly, SCOUT batting leader Robbie Grossman has been named to the East team. (Note: Jason Catania has some notes on the Rising Stars game, too. Trust him like your own brother — that one really untrustworthy brother you have.)

Fox and Rodriguez Become Free Agents
Baltimore half-catcher Jake Fox and Seattle infielder Luis Rodriguez both elected free agency after being outrighted Wednesday by their respective clubs, Roch Kubatko of MASNsports.com and Greg Johns of MLB.com report. Both players would seem to have some use — in particular Rodriguez, who offers positional flexibility and likely better offensive production than this year’s (.219 BABIP-influenced) 76 wRC+ would suggest.

SCOUT Leaderboards: Dominican Winter League
Batting Leaderboard
Here is the SCOUT batting leaderboard for the Dominican Winter League (DWL). SCOUT represents an attempt to derive something meaningful from small samples and is the average of a player’s standard deviations from the DWL mean in three important (and regressed) stats: walk rate, strikeout rate, and home-run rate. (Click here for more on SCOUT.)

Notes
• Ricardo Nanita is a 30-year-old first base/left field-type in the Toronto system, signed towards the end of 2010 out of the Mexican League. He walked and struck out at rates of 8.4% and 10.2%, respectively, in 215 plate appearances at Triple-A Las Vegas. There’s likely not enough power here — or total offense — for Nanita to start in the majors, but he could make a decent injury replacement, it seems, and he’s also probably more productive offensively than Lyle Overbay.
• Cincinnati third-base prospect Juan Francisco, who’s walked in only 99 of his 2554 minor-league plate appearances, has walked nine times (for a rate of ca. 14%) so far in the DWL.

Pitching Leaderboard
For pitchers, SCOUT is the average of a player’s standard deviations from the DWL mean in (regressed) strikeout and walk rate.

Notes
Left-hander Raul Valdes, 30, played in both the St. Louis and New York (AL) systems this year, and pitched well in 13 major-league apperances (12.0 IP, 55 TBF, 27.3% K, 10.9% BB, 31.3% GB, 3.08 SIERA, 3.64 xFIP, 93 xFIP-). In his last two season of affiliated baseball, Valdes has made 41 total appearances (14 of them starts) and posted this line: 99.2 IP, 102 K, 20 BB, 11 HR. He appears to profile as an entirely serviceable LOOGY — one that could be paid the league minimum.

Prospecting: John Sickels on Detroit
John Sickels’ Top 20 Prospect List for the Detroit Tigers
John Sickels has published his preliminary top-20 list for the Detroit Tigers.

Sickels views the Tiger system as top-heavy with pitching. To wit: four of the five top players on his list — Jacob Turner, Casey Crosby, Andrew Oliver, Drew Smyly — are pitchers. After that, there appears to be a drop-off in talent. So far as relative unknowns are concerned, Sickels champions Venezuelan shortstop Eugenio Suarez, who played this year as a 19-year-old in the short-season New York-Penn League and managed five homers in 229 plate appearances — which, if you peruse the leaderboards, you’ll note is a kind of accomplishment.